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Thursday, 12 June 2014

Shallow Brown: a rural idyll left empty in Jim Crace's Harvest

Harvest augurs Autumn

I was intrigued by Jim Crace’s Harvest before I picked it
up, having witnessed the author announcing casually on stage (at the Man Booker Prize
shortlist readings) that he wrote this ostensibly historical novel without doing
any research whatsoever. Certainly this book is set in the past, but Crace is
deliberately vague about the year and the actual location, except that it is a rural
village. This is exactly what I am doing with my first short story collection, and
I have worried sometimes about mucking about with bits of pre-industrial
Britain without committing to any of their specific times and spaces. Harvest looked like an opportunity to
learn from a master.

It is a strange book. What Crace has done with language is
superb, as satisfying as sitting down to a 16th century harvest
meal in 2014, and tasting the earth and the human toil in every spoonful of
wholegrain. He sticks to the language of the land, of arable farming, and fills
his phrases with Anglo-Saxon words as well as pleasing vocabulary for those of
us who fetishise the pastoral past a little. His descriptions of the crop, the
harvest and the landscape about the village are excellent nature writing, which
in fiction I find far more appealing than the self-consciously knowledgeable elegies
of actual nature writers. But if I hadn’t heard him say himself that he didn’t
research, I would sometimes have suspected him of succumbing to the temptation
of showing off his learning. There are passages spelling out processes, such as
the making of vellum, which in the end contribute little to the story. This
might be a short story writers’ complaint, however.

As well as choosing his words carefully, Crace has chosen
certain phrase structures which lend a heavy, unavoidable rhythm to the prose,
which rarely breaks. The result is a slow and steady pace which is suited in
places but never really changes, even when drama is ramping up, such that
tension is lost and the reader begins to wonder how to distinguish between what
matters and what doesn’t in the narrator’s version of events.

The narrator himself is also problematic. At first I thought
this was deliberate, believing I perceived an Ishiguro-esque refusal of this
quiet outsider to tell us what he really feels, what is really going on. Events
take such turns that I expected this, like the pace, to break at some point,
and the sunshine of revelation to break through this cloudy voice, but it didn’t
happen. Even though the narrator had already lost his wife, and goes on to lose
much more, I never really felt his pain or loneliness. He didn’t turn out to be
anything more or less than he first seemed, and this was somehow disappointing.
Whilst I don’t demand that so-called essential of good story-telling – that a
character must change, or learn, in some way – I found I noticed that this one
didn’t. The noticing was not a good sign.

This peculiar blankness in the text was only compounded by
the fact that almost all of the significant action takes place off-stage. Women
and a child are tortured, people die, buildings are burned and friendships
ruined by suspicion and allegations, but the narrator is rarely witness, and so
we receive all this second-hand or through sinister hints. The latter I liked –
often what you imagine is worse than what you are shown, after all – but Crace
did this to such an extent that sometimes it felt like a cop-out. Again,
another tenet of writing sprang to mind: show, don’t tell. There was an awful
lot of telling here. The most problematic element in this was the appearance,
and then disappearance for most of the book, of the woman described in the
cover blurb as ‘dangerously magnetic.’ She seems to exert a malignant power
over the narrator and his fellow men, and is implicated in the havoc wreaked, yet
she is barely there, even in the imagination of the supposedly bewitched
narrator.

Crace has done something wonderful in Harvest, paying a kind
of homage to a place that never existed and doing so in writing so careful and
gorgeous it could be a prose poem. Its downfall is that it could be almost
exactly that: in retrospect the plot feels almost incidental, and the
impressions I am left savouring are ones of physical landscapes, not emotional
ones. Interestingly, this is precisely a problem I often face with my own writing
project, and so reading Harvest was
indeed a lesson, and I will take heed.

P..S 'Shallow Brown' is a folk song - you can hear Percy Grainger's wonderful arrangement on Youtube here.

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About Me

I am a writer, mainly of short stories, and those often with a folkloric bent. Some of these I write as part of my PhD in Creative Writing, at the University of Chichester. I am associate editor at The Word Factory, where I co-run a short story club, and I also run my own critique group for short story writers in London. Before all of that, I studied Philosophy for a long time, with an emphasis on philosophy of mind and rationality. I live in London and have a 'real' job as well as writing, but happily I reside by a little patch of woods which is all I need to keep me sane.